The World Economic Forum (WEF) is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum is a trusted platform for world leaders from government, business, civil society and academia to engage in forward-looking discussions to address global issues and improve the state of the world. The WEF’s Annual Meeting in Davos is a unique collaborative environment where initiatives are created and priorities are set for global impact.
The challenge: Coordinating hundreds of media professionals
Each year, hundreds of members of the media attend WEF gatherings in Davos and beyond. There are top-tier international broadcasters alongside regional outlets from every corner of the world. The WEF media team is responsible for helping media organizations access the Congress Centre and conduct onsite interviews with meeting participants, across two key needs:
- Interview Rooms: WEF provides dedicated locations and specialized facilities where media crews can conduct live interviews. With limited rooms and high demand, organizing bookings efficiently, with maximum resource utilization and minimum friction, is essential.
- TV Rotations: TV crews wishing to access the Congress Centre must submit requests in advance and be accompanied by WEF staff at the entrance. Coordinating these pickups smoothly, across dozens of organizations and constantly shifting schedules, requires a streamlined system for both submission and logistics management.
Supporting the media presence, organizing interviews, and coordinating with TV crews is a major logistical operation.
Before using Teamup, these needs were handled with spreadsheets, hundreds of phone calls, messaging and emails along with countless live human interactions between media representatives and WEF staff. Staff transcribed handwritten notes, chased updates across multiple channels, and carried printouts across the Forum that were often outdated by the time they arrived. Booking conflicts had to be resolved manually, schedule changes communicated one by one.
For a highly skilled team focused on delivering a world-class experience, it was an unnecessary drain: time and energy spent managing complex booking information that scattered across disconnected spaces.
The solution: A shared, secure booking calendar
Click to enlarge: #AM26 media booking calendar
After years of juggling an inefficient and frustrating process, the WEF team sought a more innovative solution that could streamline operations and achieve better results. It was important to find something simple and user-friendly, without the complexity of bespoke software. The WEF media team discovered Teamup in 2016 and have been using it ever since for room bookings with great success.
Click to enlarge: #AM26 media booking calendar with TV rotations.
Over time, the collaboration has grown significantly. In 2022, the solution expanded to include the coordination of TV Rotations as well. What began as a single-event deployment in Davos now spans both of WEF’s flagship gatherings, with Teamup serving as the media booking platform at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions in China as well. The partnership has only deepened over the past decade, with each year’s deployment building on the last.
With deep product knowledge and operational expertise, Teamup Co-founder and CEO Jenny Zhan has provided onsite support at multiple events, personally working alongside the WEF team and media representatives throughout this collaboration to ensure the smoothest possible experience for everyone involved.
Click to enlarge: Teamup CEO Jenny Zhan at the 2023 WEF Annual Meeting.
“We’re very grateful to have your support on site, it made a great difference and it was really helpful! We heard quite some positive feedback on Teamup, so well done!”
– Di Dai, Media Lead, Public Engagement, World Economic Forum
Teamup capabilities in action
Teamup is a calendar, but it’s much more than a calendar. With a wide range of features, Teamup shortcuts the ways that information is captured, accessed, processed, retrieved and shared. It simplifies the logistics of information input and output on a simple calendar interface without the complication of bespoke software systems.
- Matching needs and availability: When a media organization needs an interview room at a specific time, they can view all the room availability at a glance, with each room in its own column and color-coded.
- Self-booking with privacy: Each media organization is given unique calendar access, which enables them to make bookings on any available slots without contacting the WEF team. The granular access permissions allow each media team to book rooms, and update their own bookings at any time, but prevent them from seeing or changing the booking details made by others.
- Real-time updates at everyone’s fingertips: When a new booking or change is made, it is immediately accessible on the calendar. The booking updates in real-time allow the WEF team to see and respond to individual requests with minimum delays as well as keep an overview of the whole operation as it unfolds.
- Flexibility: In a dynamic environment, a booking system is only as good as the information it captures. Teamup’s custom event fields and descriptive field labels make it easy for everyone to record, process, and share the details that matter. Required fields prevent incomplete submissions. Comments on each booking entry add clarification where needed. The result is a system where nothing gets lost and no one loses momentum waiting for missing information.
- Scalability: For TV Rotations, each media organization gets its own dedicated sub-calendar within a single master calendar. Despite the total number of calendars running well beyond 200, granular access permissions mean each organization sees only their own schedule. The interface is uncluttered and each organization’s bookings stay private. The WEF team, meanwhile, sees everything in one view, with the ability to toggle individual sub-calendars on and off or filter for specific requests as needed.
- Bulk Import: At this scale, manually creating hundreds of sub-calendars and calendar links would be time-consuming and error-prone. Teamup’s bulk CSV import makes it possible to set up the entire operation quickly and accurately: Starting from a simple spreadsheet of organizations, each with their own customized access to the booking calendar.
- Mobile Access: At a conference where everyone is constantly on the move, the web interface alone isn’t enough. Teamup’s iOS and Android apps give media crews, WEF coordinators, and support staff full access to bookings and updates from wherever they are on the Forum grounds.
A partnership built to last
A decade long collaboration between Teamup and the World Economic Forum continues to grow. Each deployment brings new insights that sharpen the platform, and each year the operation runs more smoothly than the last. It’s a partnership built on trust, refined by experience, and designed to keep improving.
